


Nowhere Music

by LizBee



Category: Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-28
Updated: 2007-07-28
Packaged: 2017-10-03 21:30:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LizBee/pseuds/LizBee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I was a dad once."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nowhere Music

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Branwyn for her beta.
> 
> Lyrics are from Augie March's "One Crowded Hour" because it was just that sort of day.

_Well put me in a cage full of lions, I'll learn to speak lion, in fact I know the language well  
I picked it up while I was versing myself in the languages they speak in hell  
That night the silence gave birth to a baby  
But they took it away to her silent dismay and they raised it to be a lady  
Now she can't keep her mouth shut_  
"One Crowded Hour"

 

None of this really happened.  It's just a story.  You have to remember that it's not true. 

For one thing, it doesn't make sense.  This story, it's nonsense, it's stupid.  It's a romantic fiction imposed on a culture that emphasises undeniable mathematical truths.  Sure, _Time Lord_, it has a nice sound, and all that business about the children gazing into the vortex, big elaborate costumes and you can't help but wonder how long it would take to extract your lover from all that fabric, but at the end of the day, we're talking about a xenophobic technocracy with a strong emphasis on social duties.  They just don't _do_ that.

On the other hand, there's a war on.  Or maybe it hasn't started yet.  It's hard to say.  But people do strange things in war, this is a universally accepted fact that can be used to explain away any old oddity, from genocide to a secret marriage between the Gallifreyan president and a nameless renegade.

Really.

This didn't happen, but if it had, it could have gone like this:

The third sun hasn't yet set, and the second moon is just rising, and they meet just beyond the boundaries of the Untempered Schism.  Romana has abandoned the presidential robes for plainer garb in the colours of her House.  The Doctor is dressed as a human, as always.  She might as well bind herself to an offworlder, the officiant thinks; he is from her House, and he doesn't approve.  But argument will only make her more stubborn; the family has chosen to wait until she admits her error.  They will be forgiving.  It will be terribly touching.

The Gallifreyan marriage ceremony is about nucleic acids, recessive genes and phenotypes.  And time.  The cosmic and the minute.  You can assume there's a kind of poetry in it, if you want.  The vortex swirls within the Untempered Schism.  The Doctor looks at it once, then looks away.  His fingers tighten against Romana's.  Is she keeping him from running away, or is he trying to take her with him?  You decide.

The ceremony completed, the Doctor laughs and abandons decorum, puts his arms around Romana's waist and picks her up, spinning her around so that his back is against the Schism, and he kisses her.

The scandal quietly reverberates through the Capitol, because no one has anything better to think about.

And they live happily ever after.

What?  Too pat?  I did say there was a war on, but this is the romantic version.  Assume they died together or something like that.  Unmarked bodies still holding hands in the rubble.  It's beautiful.  There's true love for you.

Try this version:

It's a quiet ceremony in an unremarkable office in the Capitol.  Romana arrives late, without apology.  The Doctor is even later.  They sign the relevant documents, provide genetic samples for the records, and slip away.

Anything that follows is, of course, unwitnessed by outsiders and therefore lost to the historical record.  But it's generally believed that those heavy presidential robes are slow to remove, layer after layer of fabric, complex little ties that a fumbling lover's hand can't quite manage.  Human garb is easier.  This is probably symbolic of something.

But we can't be sure, and anyway, this never happened.

Time passes, even on Gallifrey.  The war is getting closer now, it's become an undeniable fact of history.  The Doctor stays away for longer spans; he was never around much, but now he might as well be myth.  He doesn't return until after the fall of Arcadia.  His TARDIS lands -- crashes, if you like -- in the courtyard of Romana's House and he stumbles inside, unshaven and a little mad, calling desperately for his wife and daughter.

Oh yes.  There was a child.  A daughter, in fact, a perfect specimen crafted by the most qualified geneticists of the House.  They don't go in much for messy biological reproduction on Gallifrey, too chancy, too primitive.  Tell yourself she was conceived the traditional way, if you like.  It doesn't matter.  Now she's seven, solemn and dark, given to questioning rules and leaving the Citadel to explore the wilderness beyond.  The Family elders disapprove, they resent the infusion of renegade genes into their House, but she'll be sent to the Academy within the year, they can tolerate her a bit longer.  Her name is Lilineth.  Her father calls her Lily.

The Doctor collapses at her feet.  Romana has been summoned; she arrives within minutes.  The perfect family portrait.  It's terribly touching.  Romana (the President) takes the Doctor's report, and Romana (the wife/lover/partner/mother) takes him away to rest before she returns to the Capitol, to tell her councillors about the new loss.

Losing a time war, if you've never tried it, is a long, slow process.  Win a day, lose a decade.  That planet?  It was always uninhabited.  Would you mind standing still a moment while I nip back and kill your grandfather?

The Doctor takes Lilineth out into the wilderness, and they walk for hours under the twin suns.  He tells her stories.  Funny, terrible, terrifying stories, and they're all true.  He has been a father before.  He outlived his first children; he has had many centuries to think about the things he left unsaid.

It's dark when they return to the Capitol.  The Doctor takes Lily home.  Romana is waiting for him in the presidential quarters.  They don't sleep that night.  Maybe they discuss strategy and temporal physics and politics.  Or maybe their conversation is more intimate.  Maybe they don't speak at all.  The Doctor leaves the next morning.

So it goes on, the collapse of a star and the resurrection of a madman, the destruction of the TARDIS embryos and Lilineth's departure for the Academy.  The suns rise and set, and you won't see the world ending unless you know what to look for.

Lilineth is taken to stand before the Untempered Schism.  Romana stands behind her, aware that she is present only on the sufferance of the tutors, and not particularly caring.  In defiance of all tradition, she kneels before her daughter and says, "What did you see?"

"Everything," Lilineth says softly.  "It's so sad..."

Her tutor leads her away.  She doesn't speak or eat for three days, and they worry that the father's taint is coming to the fore.  They say nothing to the Lady President, because no one wants to deliver that news.  There is general relief when Lilineth rallies and returns to the Academy routine.

(If this never happened, then she never existed.  If it happened, then she's dead.  Gone, like the rest of her race, except for one.)

(So it doesn't matter.  None of this matters at all, it's just a story.)

Romana knows nothing of this; she's worried about a treaty on the verge of collapse, and her chancellor is playing at politics, and they're running out of time.  She's not sleeping.  She's tired, and she's tired of being afraid.

She walks alone through the empty streets and corridors of the Citadel, humming snatches of lullabies and fragments of poems.  She'd like to tell herself that at least Lilineth is safe, but the Daleks have destroyed the infant TARDISes, and who knows where they'll strike next?

She walks and plans and grieves and returns to her apartments to change her clothes and start again.

(There's no real evidence for this.  No witnesses.  It's just supposition.  You can add anything you like, tears or anger or whispered conversations that allude to atrocities without making anything plain.)

And out there, hundreds of years away, the Doctor is fighting his own battles, but they have stories of their own, even if no one survives to tell them.

It's all coming to an end. 

There are no stories about the final end of Gallifrey.  There weren't enough survivors, and the Doctor never speaks of it.  Lonely gods and oncoming storms, but not -- this.

Make something up, if you like. 

Say that Romana sent Lilineth away to the furthest reaches of time, or that they escaped together.  It's almost convincing; if one Time Lord could survive and another could find himself alone and amnesiac on the Silver Escarpment at the end of the universe, then surely anything is possible--?  And Lilineth's parents loved her.  Picture Romana, running from the Citadel as the Dalek Emperor takes control of the Cruciform.  She's bleeding, and not just from shrapnel.  A deserter stabbed her in the chaos of defeat.  A stolen blade through one heart and took her Matrix key, and now she's struggling to hold off regeneration and reach the Academy.

Part of this is true.  There were witnesses to the stabbing, and the chancellory guards -- those few that survived -- searched for hours, and never found her.

Did she reach Lilineth?  There's no one alive to tell us, and if she regenerated, no one has knowingly seen her new face.

Believe what you want.  Make up your own conclusion.  It doesn't really matter, unless you have a romantic propensity for happy endings and neat conclusions.  And even if you do -- what difference does it make, in the end?  Is your life any better for believing that a couple of Gallifreyans survived the war?  It's a big universe; there are no neat family reunions to be had out there.

But you can do what you like.  It's just a story, it's flexible.  History is something else, and _truth_ is another matter entirely. 

You asked for a story.

Go on.  Ask me for the truth.

 

end


End file.
